The Status of the BigchainDB Testnet
Update on 21 June 2019: There is a new testnet at https://test.ipdb.io/, operated by the IPDB Foundation. Feel free to use it. Due to GDPR reasons, it will be reset every day at 4 am CET.
The BigchainDB Testnet is currently offline. (It was at test.bigchaindb.com.) It might come back online at some point, but in the meantime, if you need something similar, there are some instructions below.
The BigchainDB Testnet has gone through many iterations. It was launched quietly around October of 2016, to select partners. Back then, it was called the IPDB Testnet. It was operated entirely by BigchainDB GmbH, the company which initially created BigchainDB (the software). Over time, it was made public and became one of the main ways for new users to try BigchainDB and to build prototypes.
The number of nodes varied over time. By September of 2018, it had seven nodes, with each node being operated by a different BigchainDB employee. Then in October of 2018, the company announced that it had decided to focus its efforts on Ocean Protocol, and to transition the governance of the BigchainDB software over to the IPDB Foundation.
Shortly after that, the BigchainDB Testnet was scaled back to one node, with no user requirement to sign up for an account beforehand. Anyone could just post HTTP requests to it. Last week, there was some problem that caused HTTP POST requests to fail and given that we are focused on delivering Ocean Protocol, we decided to pause the testnet for now.
The IPDB Foundation has posted a job opening for a DevOps Engineer. Assuming they find someone, that person could run a “new” testnet at test.bigchaindb.com. It’s also possible that one of the IPDB Foundation’s member organizations might run a new testnet. It’s still to be determined.
The IPDB Foundation also announced that it will be starting another, different testnet, to be known as the IPDB Testnet. Please see the IPDB Blog for more details.
BigchainDB Testnet Alternatives, for Now
Meanwhile, if you want something like the BigchainDB Testnet, then one option is to run a local single-node “BigchainDB network” on your local machine. Here’s how:
- Install Git, Make, Docker, and Docker Compose on your local machine.
git clone git@github.com:bigchaindb/bigchaindb.gitcd bigchaindbmake run
That last command (make run) will download Docker images for Tendermint, MongoDB and BigchainDB Server. It then runs each of them in its own Docker container and hooks them all up using Docker Compose. Once all of that is running, you should be able to post BigchainDB HTTP requests to
http://localhost:9984
There are other commands such as make helpand make clean. You can see them all if you look inside the Makefile. You can stop all the Docker containers by going to the terminal where they are running and pressing Ctrl + C.
Troubleshooting Tip: You should not be running another MongoDB (e.g. as a background process or service) bound to port 27017. If you are, then it will conflict with the MongoDB thatmake run runs inside a Docker container. To see what is bound to what ports, do:
sudo lsof -i -P -n | grep LISTEN
Another, more involved option, is to run a BigchainDB node on AWS or some other cloud provider. To do that, see the Simple Deployment Template in the BigchainDB Server docs.
